A Few Words about Charleston

Charleston is a great city for food. Darla and I confirmed this basic truth during last week’s Annual Conference of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research. In fact, the conference unfolded slowly and haltingly due to an untimely ice storm that hit South Carolina. 

                                    Charleston

Not only did the storm prevent about half of the conference participants from showing up at all, it delayed our arrival by one day. Icy roads and bridges in the Carolinas forced us to stop for a spell in Georgia. We consoled ourselves with a self-indulgent meal at Savannah’s Olde Pink House: crispy pressed duck, scallops, and BLT salad. But I digress.

                           The Olde Pink House

Charleston is home to FIG (Food Is Good), The Hominy Grill, Five Loaves and Jestine’s, to name just a few of its prime destinations. We tried them all and, though all were good, I have to say, Jestine’s chicken and rice soup followed by blueberry peach cobbler took first prize in my opinion. 

                                  The Hominy Grill

We also had the interesting experience in Jestine’s of being seated at a table next to that of our congressman, John Mica, and his wife, Pat. I had a few pleasant words with Mr. Mica, who seemed to suspect (rightly) that I shared almost none of his political ideals when I told him we were from Rollins College. He was, nonetheless, gracious and even a little jokey. I thanked him for helping my wife procure her passport for a trip to Europe a few years ago (which his office had, in fact, done). Then, when I introduced him to Darla, he said, “Oh, this is your wife who we helped? [Pause] Or was that your other wife?”

 

                                        Jestine's

At the conference itself, I heard some interesting presentations, including one by Professor Hani Henry of Egypt on the justifications for sexual harassment offered by male offenders in Cairo. I gave a talk on slang and swearwords which allowed me to toss around shockingly obscene words and phrases with intellectual abandon. Seemed to go over fairly well.

Charleston is famous for being the site where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. On my last visit to that city, I took the Fort Sumter tour. The guide described the United States as being under attack by the Confederates in 1861. I’m pretty sure that a true Confederate sympathizer would never use that terminology. The Lost Cause mentality sees the war not as a result of traitorous rebels taking up arms against the United States, but as a mere matter of squabbling between northern and southern states - the latter defending themselves against the aggression of the former.

There is no shortage of Rebel sympathizers in Charleston where the Confederate Museum, maintained by the Daughters of the Confederacy, stands as a proud monument. I took the time to visit the museum which is fairly small and is chock full of Civil War paraphernalia. I can’t say the displays are very thoughtfully laid out, but they make up in quantity what they lack in organization: swords, uniforms, letters, diaries, Civil War-era baby clothes, regimental flags, and on and on. No pictures were allowed, so I can provide no images to back up my impression. But to get an idea of what the museum looked like, just picture the closing scene of Citizen Kane where all of Charles Foster Kane’s worldly possessions are arrayed in a cluttered warehouse, and you’ll get the idea.

                         The Confederate Museum

Besides the great restaurants and the Civil War symbols, Charleston also features some charming, old neighborhoods. In one such setting stands the 1837 B&B where we stayed, a place we happily recommend.

                   1837 B&B on Wentworth Street

And finally, allow me to humbly refer you to one of my favorite Charleston landmarks. Check it out.

The Second Battle of Olustee

I didn’t know I was a Yankee until I was nine years old. This is because I was raised in the north. In New Jersey in 1he 1950s, the Civil War wasn’t on everyone’s mind. The situation was quite different in Florida.

My family moved to Cocoa Beach in 1956, and during recess on the first day of fourth grade there, I was excitedly asked by one of my classmates, “Are you a Yankee or a Rebel?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Where are you from?”

“New Jersey.”

“Yer a Yankee! Git over there,” my classmate said, with a great deal of energy but with no apparent hostility, and he pointed to a pack of fourth grade boys that had formed up about 100 feet away.

So, I joined my fellow Yankees and we spent the next 30 minutes of recess re-enacting the Civil War as each group charged the other shouting with feigned ferocity. There seemed to be no real anger in this game, but it stoked up our spirits of tribal loyalty to blood-boiling intensity.

One year later, when our family had moved to Lakeland, the Civil War was once again re-enacted when my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Tolle, required that every morning after the pledge of allegiance to the flag, we remain standing to sing “Dixie.” By then I had learned to identify enough with my Yankee tribe that I would always insert the word “Jersey” in place of “Dixie” as I sang. In any case, it didn’t seem quite honest for me to sing, “In Dixieland where I was born in…” since it was Lafayette, Indiana, that I had actually been "born in," which is hundreds of miles away from Dixie.

Mrs. Tolle also introduced me to Southern manners when I answered “Yes” to a question she had posed, and she, with hot indignation, demanded that I answer her with “Yes, ma’am.”

Yes, ma’am.

My Yankee upbringing had never specified that ma’am and sir distinguished courtesy from rudeness, but Mrs. Tolle made it clear that this was part of the new code I had to learn, lest I invite myself to a real down-home whuppin’.

Years later, when I moved to California to attend graduate school, my fellow students there identified me as a Southerner. I didn’t object to this, since they seemed to think being Southern made me interestingly exotic. Also, by then I had learned to love grits and red beans and rice, so I felt I was Southern enough to pass in the greater Los Angeles area.

I see from Lizette Alvarez's article in today’s New York Times that the Civil War is still not over in Florida. The issue is the famous Battle of Olustee (well, famous in North Florida), where a detachment of 6,000 bluecoats got shellacked by a slightly smaller contingent of rebs and had to skedaddle back to Jacksonville in February of 1864. 

           Lithograph from 1894 depicting Florida's Battle of Olustee


What’s making Jefferson Davis tremble in his grave is the recent proposal by the Florida chapter of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War to place an obelisk in the Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park. Currently three monuments commemorating the Confederate soldiers already stand there, but there's nary a one for the Yankees.

The Confederate response? No go.

According to the Times story, John W. Adams, a former division commander in Florida for the Sons of Confederate Veterans declared, “Old grudges die hard. And feelings run deep.”

Well, I reckon they surely do.

The Times story continues:

“…the request has enraged many in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which views the state’s decision as a betrayal of the small park’s legacy. As word spread, an online call to arms was issued by the national Confederate group’s leader to oppose the ‘Darth Vader-esque obscene obsidian obelisk’ in what the group’s members see as the Second Battle of Olustee. Reinforcements were drafted, namely State Representative Dennis Baxley, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.”

I suppose that in the eyes of the Sons of the Confederacy, Darth Vader was a fairly typical Yankee.

The “Second Battle of Olustee” reminds me of the argument made by Joshua Greene in Moral Tribes, his study of the ways in which morality is often intimately linked to one’s sense of tribal loyalty. Greene’s book, by the way, is quite good, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the psychological roots of human moral systems. He offers a barrelful of evidence from psychological studies that show how a wide range of human motivators are apparently rooted in our genetic make-up and responsible for our capacity to survive as cooperative group members. These include “empathy, familial love, anger, social disgust, friendship, minimal decency, gratitude, vengefulness, romantic love, honor, shame, guilt, loyalty, humility, awe, judgmentalism, gossip, self-consciousness, embarrassment, tribalism, and righteous indignation.”

Despite his scientific credentials and good intentions, I’m afraid Professor Greene would never win the approval of Mrs. Tolle nor the Sons of the Confederacy. His main argument, ultimately, is that the best thing we can do when tribes collide is to hold our loyalties in check and seek a neutral basis on which to build a pan-tribal moral framework. And as far as the Confederate Sons of Olustee are concerned, a pan-tribal framework would be a desecration of the sacred site. “After all,” they seem to be saying, “the Yankees took a hard lickin’ here some 150 years ago, and that’s the one thing folks need to remember when they visit this park.”

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On a related topic, I have made the argument that my Great Great Grandfather Flynn may have actually won the Civil War. (Culture World, July 31, 2010)